July 2011

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of burgers. Simple, yet delicious. A paleo-compliant comfort food (once you toss the bun). And one of the few remaining fast foods that I’ll eat. But, as with most things, it never tastes quite as good as when made from scratch at home. Since skipping the bun can make your plate feel bare, I usually try to incorporate some sort of sauce or topping to make it more exciting. This recipe for Moroccan-spiced lamb burgers with salsa from Epicrious fit the bill. There are a medley of flavours, and it looks pretty to boot. Definitely not a boring burger.

Batch cooking is probably my number one strategy for healthy eating. It just makes my life so much easier. And these 10 tools make batch cooking easier. They are incredibly useful for any sort of cooking, but become simply essential when batch cooking. Check them out…

This here is my favourite way to eat steak. Grill it up medium rare, smother it with some freshly made parsley garlic butter, and throw on some grilled asparagus. Top it all off with an egg or two, sunny side up drizzled with some Worcestershire sauce. Season with salt and pepper. Dig in, breaking up the yolk with your fork and spreading the runny goodness all over. Nomnomnom….

I’ve had some time to reflect on my very first elimination diet, which ended last week. I’d like to share some thoughts/tips with you, based on my experience. If you missed my previous 3 posts, you may want to check out the following:

Overall, I think the elimination diet is a very useful tool, and I highly recommend trying it out. As I mentioned in my last post, my results were somewhat inconclusive, due mostly to circumstance (life got busy/hectic). But I still learned a lot from it, and it was a good exercise in listening to my body and paying attention to how I react to various foods.

When purchasing a whole cow (which in case you’re wondering, I shared with others), you get to decide how it gets butchered. The butcher advised against grinding the tougher cuts of meats, saying that there’d be plenty of ground beef from the leftover bits, and that when properly cooked, the tougher cuts still taste great. A year later, all the ground beef is gone, and I’m left scratching my head how to make the roasts less tough, while getting bored of pot roasts. It’s not quite as simple as promised – I don’t know if it’s this particular steer or farm, the fact that it’s 100% grass-fed, or the cooking methods. But after trying every which way, this particular method offered a lot of bang for your buck. Meaning pretty decent results considering the lack of required effort. It’s basically high-heat cooking, which is supposed to destroy grass-fed meat. The catch is that it’s only at a very high temperature for a very short period of time. This is a nice cooking method to add to your repertoire, for variety, and a quick and easy way to prepare meat. It’s probably better suited to smaller roasts, and the eye of round roast turned out surprisingly tender for grass-fed beef.